The opening episode of season four, He That Believeth In Me, deep-dives into the painfully isolating nature of prophecy. As showrunner Ronald D. Moore points out - When somebody really is a
prophet or a seer or a visionary...they’re
shunned, rejected, ignored...people who have a genuine foreknowledge or greater awareness generally don’t have a good
life...'

I can't help see the show as anything other than the story of a withering Machine Jihad that seeks to replace humanity as the children of God. Yet in the process of euthanising its parent culture, belatedly realises that it seeks human acceptance and wonders - to paraphrase Moore - 'What if they’re like us and we’ve been doing all these terrible things this whole time...if they could have created us so
easily, what does that say about how special we are...maybe we’re not touched by God
either...maybe we’re some sort of fairly easy technological accident.' Indeed, this introspection gives rise to machine atheism!

My interpretation is an inversion of Moore's story which is essentially oriented around humanity and it's struggle to comprehend that their greatest fear isn't that their offspring aren't human - but that they are and that turning inwards against each one other is a more potent existential threat than the Cylons.

In reading Wired's piece today on Ray Kurzweil' notion of the Singularity, I can't help but wonder that in seeking to create machine consciousness, modeled on our own understanding of human consciousness, that we sow the seeds for inevitable spirituality arising amongst machines. Perhaps Battlestar Galactica is actually the most sophisticated piece of Singularity fiction since Blade Runner, raising not only provocative parallels to current events, but forcing viewers to consider what it means to be human.

I'm A Muslim, Get Me Out Of Here! Uhuh, that's exactly what I was feeling just minutes into last night's opening episode of Channel 4's Make Me A Muslim...it may as well have been called Jihad Factor, Strictly Forbidden or X-Terrorist.

It seems the contestants learned nothing about the belief structure of Islam or the very personal, spiritual journey of belief in any religion, but simply the superficial, surface elements of being Muslim; how to dress, eat and avoid alcohol. As noted by the Telegraph 'the place of Islam could just as easily have been taken by
an Edwardian house or a 1950s school'.

By focusing simply on the outward appearance and behavior of Muslims, the four Imams appeared ridiculously irrelevant to modern life, rapidly alienating pretty much all the participants. In turn the producers managed to contrive situations for maximum conflict...

Selecting Harrogate as the backdrop - a place which is about as mono-cultural as a British town can get. Why not places of some diversity like London, Manchester or Birmingham?

Choosing four imams who were unable to give reasoned, non-judgemental, rational theological explanations...and who largely looked that they'd been dressed by Hamas.

Setting up a gay man with an imam that had zero understanding of homosexuality. Whilst 'Mohammed' prowled the streets of Harrogate trying to hook up the poor guy with a girl, his counterpart setup the hapless fella on a date with a cricket team! Upon being told he dressed too effeminately for a man, he told 'Suleyman' that the shalwar he wore looked kinda like a dress...touché!

Encouraging a glamour model to shop from Pakistani fashion stores in Bradford to look more 'Islamic', ignoring the fact that most Muslim women in the UK shop from the same places as everyone else!

Ignoring the plight of a Christian woman involved with a Muslim man who's family refuse to acknowledge her. Here was a story where the potential to overcome bigotry with Islam's tolerance was overlooked in favour of a disingenuous argument on how Muslims are seeking to 'impose' Sharia in 'our' country.

The programme's creators and the imams presented Islam as a mono-cultural experience, ignoring the reality that there's a diversity of beliefs and cultures into which Islam has adapted, including Britain.

Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days - Muslims In America was a much more dignified study of Islam's applicability in the West. David Stacy, a Christian American, lived with an American Muslim family for a month and though he struggled to locate his own theological beliefs within Islam, he found much in common with Islamic family life and the basic humanity of being Muslim.

Both David and the Muslim family came away with dignity and an increased respect for one another's beliefs.

A considered, intelligent, journalistic and respectful tone results in shows like 30 Days. When the motive is conflict, drama and ratings, then you can't expect much more than the crap that was Make Me A Muslim.

A few weeks ago, I got to tinkering with Satisfaction, a web app for 'people-powered customer service'...it's a wonderful concept, essentially crowdsourcing support :)

Interestingly, products and service listings aren't 'owned' by companies and organisations; they're simply participants, placing them on an equal footing with their customers...I'm sure diminishing a company's control over its support will help surface support conversations between customers as well as help the companies understand customer issues more clearly.

I got to thinking about employing Satisfaction for both mee:view and Believr, but cheekily ended up setting up some Customer Supporty for Islam; a product/service with which many people have grievances, also ts customers don't necessarily know how to use Islam correctly ;)

Tarique and I have been plotting service ideas for Believr for several months and with a lot of our family and friends now happily ensconced in Twitter and Facebook...we're starting to think about how we can bring Believr to users in those services...

Tarique and I are gonna suggest (* to signal when you're praying, followed by the name of one of the five daily or optional prayers for Muslims. For example...

(* fajr

(* zohr

(* asr

(* maghrib

(* isha

(* tahajjud

We'll be sampiing (* from Twitter's public timeline and attempting to visualise the results - by user, location and time where we can - over the coming days and weeks. It'll be wonderful to see real time Islamic serendipity unfold...I'd love to get my friends at Stamen or Poly9 to plot the waves of prayer moving across the globe, following the path of the Sun, centered on Mecca :)

This kinda fulfils some of our aspirations for Believr, using Muslims' relationships to help remind themselves, and each other, of their spiritual and human responsibilities. Islamic prayer is one of the Five Pillars that underpin our faith and the cohesion of the Muslim community; by helping people pray, we hope we're making the world a better place :)

The month of Shawwal has been a symmetry of life and death for our family, bracketed by the passing of loved ones and punctuated by the arrival of new lives.

Twenty eight days ago, on the bright, crisp Autumn morning of Eid-ul-Fitr, we lost our beautiful baby sister Aisha after a long and debilitating illness...just three days ago, a distant cousin and my uncle Jawaid died suddenly and unexpectedly.

However, amidst our sorrow, I became an uncle myself with the arrival of my cousin Nadia's newborn son, Idris,...only days later, my youngest cousin Yousef was born.

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Last Friday, Boing Boing posted a piece on networked tombstones; though ostensibly a morbid fad, the concept is actually quite sensitively articulated. Each headstone carries a device connected to an online memorial, containing genealogical information, a Facebook profile and a family tree. I find this to be a wonderful concept. Cemeteries are not simple places, but densely layered records of human history - overlapping stories of lives, times, places and people that are our shared heritage. To make available the stories of those lost is a fitting monument to a life and also the basis for a locative medium that speaks to us all.

A few months ago, I worked with students of IDII on digital identity, exploring the relationships between people, places and time. Many of the projects explored how we relate to places bustling with life and activity - notably cities and airports. To paraphrase James T. Kirk, if how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life then the places where our lives come to rest should be as significant a part of our digital identity as where our lives were lived.

Just two days before the arrests of the alleged Toothpaste Terrorists in August, UK Home Secretary John Reid made a speech about sacrificing civil liberties in support of national security. The suspects had been tracked for several months, so the timing of Reid's speech was deeply manipulative; emphasising an urgent, imminent threat that simply did not exist.

Reid's assertion that foreign policy cannot be 'shaped under the threat of terrorist activity’ is almost laughable when it's clear that foreign policy is driving terrorist activity!

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There's a sharp lesson here for British Muslims - if we wish to affect foreign policy, we must exercise our democratic will; the first generation of Muslim immigrants patiently changed the nature of British politics to embrace equality in law, we must now patiently assert our disgust at foreign policy on every part of the political spectrum. Violence will not change anything 7/7 and the recent arrests prove this - democratic change may be slow and take generations, but it worked before and we must at least try to make it work again.

In the United States, AIPAC ensures that every US politician understands that support for Israel is crucial to national electoral success. As Cameron, Brown, and potentially Reid himself, position themselves to lead Britain, British Muslims must organise a non-partisan lobby that sustainably ensures that all British politicians understand that an ethical, just foreign policy is essential for British electoral success and successful governance.

UPDATE - Though the EU-US talks on sharing passenger data collapsed today, the British government has a 'patch' in place to make sure they could continue to inform on their own citizens, despite its illegality in other EU nations. Why don't we go the whole hog and issue disembarkation cards for Gitmo at check-in...just in case.

My good friend Ali is due to make one of his many media appearances tommorow on the BBC Asian Network. Ali's inadvertently become the go-to guy for the media on hip'slam so I figured some media training on live TV, press conferences, radio appearances and interviews would stand him in good stead. A few tips:

Avoid the traditional Belchistani Burp most imams automagically invoke when a microphone-enabled device is within proximity.

I'm being glib...Ali's charming, funny, hugely talented (he's also first prize in Emel's postcard contest) and a good face for Islam in the UK. Maybe those rules above are the just the media training that Albert Kaida's mates all work to ;)

Years ago someone gave me a planner consisting of thirty personal targets that one should aim to complete within the month of Ramadan. I never managed to follow the planner, but I intend to do so this year...and also to share, so here goes:

Visit the graveyard or attend a Janaza prayer and make Du'a for the deceased.

Visit a sick person (70'000 angels seek forgiveness for you when you do this).

Remember to write your will if not done so already.

Attend a gathering to gain more knowledge about Islam.

I'm going to cross one off as I start doing each activity...and hopefully get as close to thirty as I can by Eid-ul-Fitr. I guess it's more a collection of desirable good deeds than a set of actual compulsory tasks.

If I figure it out, I might try porting the targets to 43 Things or Ning and try add a social dimension...so time to reboot your souls people. Get Busy.

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UPDATE: I've managed to get through about a third of the tasks, mostly the personal rather than social ones, but on the whole the list helped me to bring some focus to my Ramadan...next year, I'll have a better approach. Inshallah. For the time being, I do feel renewed, cleansed and a little optimistic for the first time in almost two-and-a-half years :)